I predict that the ASO adds a Ventoux TT. That's basically a 1 hour TT and the biggest chance to give Bardet and for that matter Barguil an opening on Froome.

Why do you think Froome would not win this? Sky would have training camps there, and Froome would be hammering the course on a Kickr ergo for months beforehand until they knew he was putting out more watts /kg than anyone else was capable of.

Thought I saw Jens Voight mentioned earlier as someone who raced clean against Rasmussen. It wasn't in pink and that threw me. We do know he raced with CSC, right?

That'd be the doper Rasmussen: surely the worst TT ever.//

The Chicken, I loved that guy!! Just out of curiosity, who were the clean guys again he raced against in his entire career???

Neither Alpe d'Huez nor Ventoux were used today. I predict that the ASO adds a Ventoux TT. That's basically a 1 hour TT and the biggest chance to give Bardet and for that matter Barguil an opening on Froome. Add a short 12K opening TT and the ASO have "two TT's", but in reality all they are doing is putting in a mountain top finish on a short stage that is equivalent to any of these climbers going on a solo breakaway. I could even see them making the first TT a TTT with all of the funny math to limit losses. AG2R should be OK at this. If they have the TTT + a Ventoux ITT, Aru, Bardet, a rested Quintana, Uran, Landa...all these guys can compete with Froome. Save this posting because its going to happen. The ASO will want a French champion (and they really have a chance on the right format) and set up the course for that.

Thanks for the posts! (When is Dan going to add a function for "liking" posts?)

RE HR, that's normal; would also be interesting to know how much power is down (usually much less than HR).

Well thew whole experience is now complete.

I got to ride a team car during TT warm up yesterday to do some product testing. Then I was lucky enough to get a spot in the car for the actual race. I followed Zeits. Whoever thinks that course is not technical needs to give it a try. I feared for the life of spectators as the car just flew around some pretty damn tight corners.

I saw a Bahrain guy pretty close to drafting. Zeits caught him and we were stuck behind the Bahrain car and I know what 10m is and well....it was like a typical AGer triathlete 10m :-)

But to complete the experience, we had doping control in the bus when Fabio came back. He couldn't pee so they followed him around until he could.

We topped it off with some post race "beverages" and off they go. They fly to Paris this morning while I make my way to Girona to test some guys over there.

For the round water bottle issue : Some of the guys use a round bottle in warm up and they swap to an aero bottle during the race. One guy was about to leave and I though "OMG, Dev can't see this", I pointyed it out to the mechanic and they fixed in in a few seconds. Crisis averted, Dev won't have to comment.

It's a friggin zoo the day of the TT. It's amazing more mistakes are not made. I saw a ton of them. Not only that, the riders are toast. One guys was showing me his power files for training and racing and how beat up they are. They can't get their HR up by the end.

It was an experience

LOL....I thought it was so obvious that I did not need to put that in pink!!!

That's my prediction either a nominal prologue or TTT, plus an uphill or mountain TT. We have seen this year how ASO will push the rules as far as they can get away with to help the French riders. I can see Sky picking up a young French talent soon. I sure Brailsford said he would like to win one day with a French rider and it might have positive pr effects among the roadside French fans.

Shame as I thought with the right course with just enough TT'ing and mountain finishes could create a great Froome, Tommy D vs the pure climbers show down.

Dev, here is a link to pretty much the same course that we did during the 1997 France Iron Tour. We had to do multiple laps up to Notre -Dame de la Garde.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTjJzceKd3I

Enjoy

One of the things I've seen in this TT and others in previous years I've always wondered about-

Some of the riders had what appeared to be several inches of risers straight vertical from the base bar up to the pads. If I saw this at some local tri my initial reaction would probably be that the owner might have made a mistake and bought a frame that was too small. At this level of competition that seems like a much less likely explanation :-).

I suppose that given that your Tour team has a bike sponsor, they have simply picked the size frame that is the best match for reach and pedestal'ed to get the desired stack. Is that it? Or is there some advantage unknown to me for that much gap between base bar and pads?

Chris